Chapter 310 - 302. Twilight
Following a faint red footprints, Rina climbed the stairs until she reached an arrow sign that said rooftop. At the end of the stairs, she found two things; the rooftop door, and a crouching Han Shin.
"Shin? Why are you here?" she asked the healer, who, instead of going to the rooftop to heal Zein as he intended earlier, was crouching beside the door with his head between his knees. "What about Zein?"
"...later," he replied quietly with a restrained voice, as if holding back on his tears. "Let’s...let’s come in later...okay?"
Rina shifted his gaze toward the rooftop door, and faintly, through her heightened sense, she could feel the presence of two people, and the sound of choking sobs.
In the all years she knew Bassena Vaski, she had seen the man getting angry, throwing tantrums, and venting everything by breaking the training room. But today was the first time she saw Bassena shed tears, and the first time she heard him crying so miserably. And she didn’t think she would be able to ever forget that sound.
Biting her lips, she crouched beside the healer and hugged the quietly sobbing man. "Okay," she patted his back. "He’ll be fine," she said, perhaps to tell herself too. "It’s Zein, he’ll be fine."
"I know," Han Shin whispered a reply, burying his head deeper on his knees. "I know..."
Rina let out a long sigh, patting the healer’s back while looking out the window, watching the sky getting dimmer and dimmer, and listening to the sobbing voice getting quieter and quieter. As an esper who always stood as a vanguard, she often became the first witness to violence and death. Because of that, she had thought she got number and number each time, that she wouldn’t get affected by anything anymore, and yet...
In the end, heartbreak is heartbreak.
For her, and probably for everyone who knew about this today, it wasn’t just a matter of something bad happening, or that they weren’t able to prevent it from happening. What made it all the more heartbreaking was because she knew...she knew it was the one thing Zein had tried to fight, to avoid. Becoming this strong, wearing masks and covering his skin everywhere, always acting cautious—Zein did everything that he could to prevent this exact thing from happening.
And yet, in the most ironic way, it happened to him when he was seemingly safe and sound inside a highly protected building in the green zone, after managing to dodge it all when he was still in the end zones.